A male student at Brown University was accused of sexual misconduct and some students led a pressure campaign on the judge to find him guilty. Luckily, the judge resisted and drew his conclusions based on the facts.

Judge reinstates Brown Univ. student accused of sexual misconduct, blasts ‘organized’ pressure to get him not to

A federal judge has reinstated a Brown University student after finding that the Ivy League school in Providence, R.I., improperly judged him responsible for sexual misconduct.

The case was yet another example of the stresses confronted by colleges and universities, whose methods of adjudicating such cases have increasingly come under heavy fire for being too aggressive toward the accused, even as they are being pressured for not being aggressive enough.

Indeed, the Brown case underscored how that tension has spread: It included an organized campaign by students supportive of the woman who brought the charge to pressure the judge into ruling against the man she had accused.

The campaign took the form of a widely circulated post urging people to email Chief Judge William E. Smith of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, telling him that reinstating the student would be “morally unjust to the survivor” and create a “public safety hazard” for Brown women.

About The Editor

Originally from Canton, Michigan, Hank Eckardt graduated from the University of Notre Dame with degrees in Political Science and Spanish. He then moved to Washington, D.C. to work for Congressman Kerry Bentivolio in 2014. After working in political fundraising for 3 years, he began as editor-in-chief of TheLead.com in June 2017.